My internship for credit – not private lessons – includes creative development and career advice, along with opportunities to read, practice my language, and hobnob over chai (the Russian version of tea-time).

And all of this – with the writers of the Irkutsk division of the National Writers’ Society in the Irkutsk Dom Literatora (House of Littérateurs), which publishes the literary journal Sibir (“Siberia”).

The Katzner Russian-English dictionary defines the Russian take of the French “littérateur” as “man of letters.” Apart from the opportunity to revel in the erudition and energy of my men-and-women-of-letters-overseers, my role in the House as the society’s first intern and first American includes a number of perks.

1. They have no idea what to do with me, thus…
2. I make my own hours, but more importantly…
3. I have the resources of a 75-year-old Russian writers society (begun under Stalin, no less) at my fingertips to create my own experience to learn about language, art, publishing, and the people of Irkutsk.

Research on how Internet advertising might solve the journal’s financial crunch, writing English translations of sci-fi shorts of the society’s resident Americophile, and grant writing to America are all projects I’ve brewed up to pitch to my supervisors, so far. How would you use an opportunity like this? Leave a comment below!

With the simple requirements of eight 10-hour weeks, keeping a journal (view the blog at http://zarisovki.wordpress.com in Russian, or try the Google translator English version), and a final paper, I’m excited for this being an exercise in initiative and creativity.

The proximity to both the industry and the languishing Russian intelligentsia, added to my readiness to take this thing by the horns, make a formula for a more than successful experience.

The last thing to do during my winter vacation: looking for something to do during my summer one.

Although renewed confidence is all that I’ve got against the second part, I’ve so far proved myself wrong, as far as enjoying the process goes. Updating and reformatting the resume and social networking sites is all fun and games for me, part-geek that I am. But with a nod to using all the cool new tools and gadgets I’ve fashioned, I came across this advice from The Personal Branding Blog.

Another mistake I see is people setting up a [LinkedIn] profile and then putting everything on autopilot. Not participating, not seeking other people out, not networking. . . . You’re leaving a lot of money on the table if you just walk away and hope your profile attracts new business.

Guilty. Kind of: without feeling too sold-out from applying the term, as much as having a “personal brand” involves actively “marketing” myself, regardless, having a presence sitting on LinkedIn or a personal site still holds the valuable capability of being a reference tool, that is, for those “researching” me.

Still, no mistake about it, the challenge remains keeping my foot on the pedal when it comes to keeping the job search active by “participating, seeking people out, networking” - constantly. Moving forward through the next month or two in the Quest for Summer Employment, it’s with a new motivation (i.e. time!) and the lesson learned to keep it movin’, knowing that I’m the one in the driver’s seat.

Exactly a month after I left Irkutsk on a three-day train to Moscow, I returned to the glorious and icy “Paris of Siberia” eager for semester two, but slightly anxious, too.

On my January travels, I didn’t make to the real City of Lights, but I have no regrets—Moscow, Germany, and the Czech Republic (with the week on the Trans-Siberian…) served me well in recovering from the first four months in Irkutsk, as well as in getting excited for the last four and a half.

Nonetheless, the mixed feelings remain, but since I’m not planning on leaving Irkutsk until semester’s end, they are likely to be sticking around. But, is that such grim news after all?

The dilemma. Is what I’m learning outside the Russian classroom making up for what I feel like I’m missing out at Middlebury in Vermont, academically? Do the challenges of negotiating social, volunteer, and professional lives in Russia balance out with the rewards of the cultural experience abroad—in a city a far cry from sharing the beauty of a Paris or Venice, to boot?

Despite the sporadic difficulties reminiscent of the USSR, the chance to spend a year abroad is a phenomenal one, in any case. The same half-skeptical questions come back, but so does the same, right answer: it’s on me to make the most of it all, and to make the “most” the “best.”

The game plan. Step one: continue what I was doing, but bigger—Russian courses (check), literature courses (an independent study and a mainstream, this time), and cultural learning (more weekend museum trips and traveling).

Step two: add more, and be bold in doing it—be involved (continue volunteering, intern in the media, teach English), be creative (sing in the IGU choir, find private time on the piano), be healthy (stick to the swim-tennis-ski schedule), and make unexpected friends doing it all.

The evaluation. Can I do it? Heck yes. Ready, go.

The blog, founded in 2006, receives well over 2000 hits every week from Midd students, college faculty and staff, parents, and others. This semester, the editorial team consists of ten writers/photographers including myself, and has expanded its scope of work to collaborating with The Campus.
Even though writing from abroad adds a slight challenge in finding subject matter meaningful for students on campus, I figure I can meet the goal of writing a post or two every month, and that a voice from someone off campus can’t hurt to add to the chorus of my fellow bloggers. After my first three posts on MiddBlog already (a review of Midd’s resources for
outdoor trips, a first installment of “Highlights from abroad,” and a story on Midd’s migrating mail service to Google, which stimulated some strong responses), I’m looking forward to the second half of the semester and finding even more to write.

To keep abreast of my adventures and learnings, visit nRussian.wordpress.com and subscribe to the RSS feed for that blog.

As my two semester-long terms as Social Director for my a cappella group, Stuck In the Middle, come to an end, I am reflecting back on what has been a productive, enjoyable, and at times stressful year of keeping it together for SIM on the “social” front. 

My first priority when I was elected to the position, one of the three official ones in the group, was to re-vamp our website. I redesigned the look (the Rubin-vase-motif inspired by Ben Broad), got the group and our schedule on Google Calendar and Google Sites, coalesced our wide-spread YouTube presence into a single channel, and started the SIM News blog, which feeds directly into our site’s home page. The blog has been successful in our having something that’s easy-to-update and our fans’ being able to keep up-to-date on our adventures and shenanigans.

Second, I (and the rest of the group, for that matter) think that our image as a fun, entertaining, corky, yet professional music ensemble is always most apparent in our performances. Accordingly, I feel that the PR aspects of the role of “social” director are most important in the concert- and performance-planning parts of the job. The group needs little direction in presenting the fun-but-professional image, but I did what I could to enhance that. So, I made sure that our three biggest on-campus concerts of the year, the final fall show in December, the birthday concert in March, and the final spring show in May, were Middlebury entertainment events to remember. The videos and blog posts are the best descriptions of what these concerts were exactly, but here, I’ll just say that the hours I put in to producing three shows (that is, the lights, spectacle, and gimmicks apart from the music) paid off. Working on the college campus required lots more organization than anything else, say, at the high school level, ever did, so I was glad to have the opportunity to move on to bigger and better stuff.

Although any of us will tell you that SIM’s “image” is something that’s far too motley to be pigeonholed into a Facebook announcement, concert poster, blog entry, or t-shirt logo, I feel that over the course of the year, I was able to lead the way in the group’s marketing of whatever image, or even “brand,” that is. As it was this semester that the group started recording its third album, made a music video, planned a world tour to Japan, and added a lot more to its repertoire and music ability (thanks to the leadership and coördination of my co-officers Ben Broad and Ryan Kellett), it’s been a real gift for me to have had the opportunity to firstly lead the group’s PR endeavors and secondly have the support of an awesome group of guys who’ve become some of my closest friends.

•  This blog (caseymahoney.wordpress.com): The center of my Internet presence. Since it’s been said that the age of the personal blog is dead, and in my opinion, Facebook and Twitter provide better spheres for people to keep track of their social doings, blog posts (like this one) are designed to provide links to my academic, professional, creative, and personal projects (see the Archives for what these are exactly) hosted elsewhere. 
•  Facebook (profile): My primary tool for keeping in touch with my friends and their pics. Along with the new semi-Twitter, semi-RSS feed look and functionality of the new(est) Facebook, I’ve added my Flikr feed, my Google Reader shared items feed, and my (forthcoming) Russia blog feed to my Wall. I’ve also allowed my status updates to be updated from Twitter. 
•  Twitter (twitter.com/caseymahoney): The abbreviated, yet more frequently updated version of what I’m up to, where I am, what I’m reading, and so forth. I’ve rediscovered it as a way of finding world news and social happenings.
•  Flickr (flickr.com/photos/caseymahoney): My photos. Since my purchase of an Olympus digital SLR camera (2006 model, E-Volt E330) off of craigslist.org back in January, I’ve had a reason to post pictures on a network different than Facebook. Additionally, the photo stream feeds in nicely to blogs and other RSS readers, for those who’d like to follow me and my lens.
•  Google Reader (RSS feed): Sharing what I find around the Internet. Primarily a way for me to catalogue some of the most interesting pieces I find on the Internet, it’s easy to use Reader to browse the feeds I frequent, and then use the “Share” function to add items I like. 
•  Google Profile (google.com/profiles/cwmahoney): So that I come up on the first page of Google results when you google my name.
•  LinkedIn (linkedin.com/in/caseymahoney): Networking from the get-go. Even though my so-called “professional” network is limited at this point, I figure it’s best to get an early start with keeping contacts I’ve made through school, work, and internships.

RUSS 151 – The Golden Age of Russian Literature - Prof. Tom Beyer

Beyer’s reading list (in English), more than 2,000 pages total, included the best of 1800s prose in Russia: Karamzin, Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. We read, blogged, and discussed for each class. For our final project, my group produced 4 hours of podcast episodes, available here: turgenevtalk.wordpress.com.

RUSS 202 – Intermediate Russian – Profs. Kevin Moss & Svetlana Titkova

As ten of the twenty-or-so students in our class were planning on spending a semester or year abroad, this was the last instruction in Russian language before going abroad or going on to summer language school, as I am. We made it through eleven of the twelve chapters of Prentice Hall’s В Пути (“On the Way”) under the excellent guidance of Kevin Klementovich and Svetlana Igoryevna.

RUSS 500 – Independent Study: Beginning Bosnian-Serbian-Croatian - Prof. Kevin Moss

Since I didn’t think that my study of the Russian language and culture would be complete without some exposure to the rest of the Slavic world, I decided to join the 4-6 students (and professors and teachers assistant–the number varied) studying the South-Slavic Diasystem, as the former-Yugoslavians’ language is officially called, with Kevin Moss, linguist extraordinaire. After the class, I feel like I could scrape by in a trip to Croatia… a supposition I guess I can evaluate in January 2010.

TEDU 218 – Teaching Methods in Secondary Education - Prof. Jonathan Miller-Lane

As Prof. Jonathan Miller-Lane decided to scrap the typical Methods course syllabus of practicing assessment and lesson formation, our class got a first-hand look into the real-time process of teaching. We supplemented our readings of various assessment and lesson strategy texts by looking at the state of Vermont’s Department of Education “Transformation” documents, observing at Middlebury Union High School, and speaking with various members and leaders of the local education community.

PSCI 101 – Introduction to Political Philosophy - Prof. Kateri Carmola

Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, Plato’s Republic and Meno, Aristotle’s The Politics, Machiavelli’s The Prince, Hobbes’ Leviathan, Rousseau’s The Social Contract, Marx’s Manifesto and Paris Manuscripts, Max Weber’s Politics As a Vocation, and Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition made up the 1,500 pages of text (100% of which I carefully read) on which this course’s lectures, discussions, and two papers were based. As my first course in politics, I’m really motivated to continue on with the minor and see what else the department has to offer.

• Monday, 5:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m., Dining Services Language Table Waiter: waiting the Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian table for my 500 class.
• Tuesday, 1:30 p.m. – 3:00 p.m., Career Services Office Employer Relations Intern: updating the CSO’s immediate job openings page and recruiting new employers for our online job and internship databases.
• Wednesday, 1:30 p.m. – 3:00 p.m., CSO.
• Thursday, 1:00 – 3:00 p.m., CSO.
• Saturday, 1:00 – 3:00 p.m., Lifeguard: lifeguarding at the natatorium.
• Sunday, 1:00 – 3:00 p.m., Lifeguard.

View my resume.

The first two weeks, graciously housed by Mary Wendell (’69) and her husband Ted in neighboring Milton, my co-interns Emmeline Cardozo and Reginald Nelson and I observed and taught in humanities department classes. We regularly met with administrators and faculty to discuss issues of urban education, which became immediately clear from the get go.

On a regular basis, we also met with a group of 10 students, who after our two weeks in Boston, accompanied us back to Middlebury on a week-long college preparation seminar, which we three interns planned, organized, taught, and eventually evaluated under the guidance of Middlebury Prof. Jonathan Miller-Lane.

The experience of working with high school teachers on a nearly peer-to-peer level gave me a plethora of new insights into the troubled state of the education system. Additionally, I learned that the profession of teaching is highly attractive to me but, what’s more, that given the proverbial feelings of limitedness to their classroom, with which many of our teacher-mentors shared their experience, I learned that I hold perhaps a greater interest in working to solve problems of education on the macro level. Still, I saw that without a keen understanding of the microcosm, any of my big ideas would be a far cry from valuable.

For my (incomplete) blog of my experience working as an intern at The Engineering School, a high school in Hyde Park, Mass. of the Boston Public School system, go to tesbostonintern.wordpress.com.